Arbitrarily accelerating space-time wave packets

Abstract

All known realizations of optical wave packets that accelerate along their propagation axis, such as Airy wave packets in dispersive media or wave-front-modulated X-waves, exhibit a constant acceleration; that is, the group velocity varies linearly with propagation. Here we synthesize space-time wave packets that travel in free space with arbitrary axial acceleration profiles, including group velocities that change with integer or fractional exponents of the distance. Furthermore, we realize a composite acceleration profile: the wave packet first accelerates from an initial to a terminal group velocity, decelerates back to the initial value, and then travels at a fixed group velocity. These never-before-seen optical-acceleration phenomena are all produced using the same experimental arrangement that precisely sculpts the wave packet's spatio-temporal spectral structure.

References in corpus (8)

• Diffraction-free space-time beams
• Ultrashort Tilted-Pulse-Front Pulses and Nonparaxial Tilted-Phase-Front Beams
• Gaussian beams diffracting in time
• The space-time Talbot effect
• V-Waves: Spatio-temporally induced group-velocity dispersion in free space
• Axial spectral encoding of space-time wave packets
• Temporal Talbot effect in free space
• Classical entanglement underpins the propagation invariance of space-time wave packets

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Observation of ultrabroadband striped space-time surface plasmon polaritons
• Exciting space-time surface plasmon polaritons by irradiating a nanoslit structure